Sometimes life is tuff, sometimes almost unbearable. Then after a while, it always seems to turn around and things get better. It's a cycle of up's and down's. Everybody has different cycles, different problems, different highs and lows. And everybody has their own way of dealing with the lows as well as celebrating the highs (I have also noticed that there are high's within the down periods and lows within the high periods. It's never completely either/or). It's all a part of the yin and yang of life's experiences.

I have found one word that helps me through the hard times. This word is so powerful and what it implies is so huge that it cannot possibly be defined. The word is "eternity". Just saying this word opens my mind to endless possibilities. We are used to seeing our lives as a series of dead ends. It's like every time we get past one wall, there's another wall down the road in the not too distant future, and we always ask our selves, we wonder, if we will be able to get past that next wall. This is where stress and worry come from.

I understand that problems have to be dealt with, most of them cannot be ignored. And the bigger the problem, the bigger the wall seems to be. But I also understand that we construct those walls. They are a creation of our own illusions and the illusion comes about because we start thinking this particular problem might be insurmountable or it might be permanent. Nothing is insurmountable and nothing is permanent, not even death. Like one of George Harrison's album title says, "All Things Must Pass".

When I contemplate on the word "eternity", I feel that next wall start to crumble and the stress begins to fade away. In fact, when I think of that word, I don't see any walls, I see my life as an endless journey, one that goes on forever. When I see my life that way, every problem I am dealing with at the moment starts loosing it's grip. It all becomes like dust in the wind, here today and gone tomorrow. In fact, I try to picture that problem as dust as I watch it being blown away in the wind.

One of my favorite authors has written that all problems are actually gifts. I can intellectualize that, it makes sense to me, until I get caught up in the middle of a problem that seems to threaten every level of my being. Then I get caught up in the false thinking that this problem is a curse, not a gift. I get over whelmed and stress and worry set in. Once the problem passes, I usually can look back at it and see that in a way it was a gift, if for no other reason than the fact that I learned some kind of lesson from it.

But wouldn't it be nice if the stress and worry never took hold? It doesn't have to. Like I said, we create them by allowing them to take hold. We bring them into existence because we're used to seeing walls, another illusion we create. I still do it. But I am finding that when I contemplate on the word "eternity", things start opening up.